Sam Biddle

It's odd to have a decent answer to "What was the worst ____?," but Color was the worst app. It did nothing amid fanfare, secured $41 million in order to accomplish this nothing, and then it just evaporated without warning. An obscene, expensive pixel farce. Watch its creator try to explain a startup Bay of Pigs.

Months before a grilled cheese sandwich raised $10 million in funding, the iPhone app Color was the …
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Head to around the four minute mark in this PandoDaily video so you can avoid four minutes of jackasses screaming over one another and the sound of clanking forks—Color co-founder Peter Pham eventually talks startup downfall.

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His explanation isn't totally satisfying—basically, the guy who was supposed to create the product never ended up really doing it, the app launched anyway while gloating over its offensive $41 million backing, the team stopped talking, and then Apple bought a bunch of them up. Fin. It's sort of like they just got a big sack of money and then didn't bother doing much else.

But Pham is one of those charmed Valley characters that can walk away from a nuclear-botched attempt at a business like this unscathed. He still has his money, his smile, and the short attention span of the internet—how many people even think about Color anymore?